Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Freedom, Freedumb, Autoliv and The Future of Automotive Safety

Transcript

Freedom, Freedumb, Autoliv and The Future of Automotive Safety · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  John Summers is the motoring historian.
• 0:02
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into
• 0:06
  a fairly inept sports bike rider.
• 0:08
  Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
• 0:12
  cheap and fast, and not much reliable.
• 0:15
  On his show, he gets together with various co hosts to talk about new
• 0:18
  and old cars, driving, Motorbikes, motor racing and motoring travel.
• 0:33
  Open the pod bay doors.
• 0:34
  Hal, I'm sorry, Dave.
• 0:38
  I'm afraid I can't do that.
• 0:43
  What's the problem?
• 0:45
  I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
• 0:48
  What are you talking about, Hal?
• 0:51
  This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
• 0:56
  I don't know what you're talking about, Hal.
• 1:01
  I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me,
• 1:05
  and I'm afraid that something.
• 1:06
  Good day.
• 1:10
  Good morning.
• 1:11
  Good afternoon.
• 1:12
  It is John Summers.
• 1:14
  The motoring historian.
• 1:15
  I always pause and like clear my throat and then need to trim that bit out right
• 1:20
  before I start speaking and then think afterwards gosh I've like muffed yet
• 1:24
  another intro to one of these pods and and you know one where I've got somebody else
• 1:29
  on that other person leaps in you know to like Mock me usually, and you know, break
• 1:35
  up the flow, but left to my own devices.
• 1:37
  I do just ramble on completely, don't I?
• 1:41
  So this offering is, uh, a sum up and some thoughts around a presentation
• 1:47
  that I went to by these guys, auto live.
• 1:50
  That's how it's written.
• 1:51
  A U T O L I V.
• 1:54
  I'd never heard of them before.
• 1:56
  The guy sitting next to me, he'd never heard of them before either.
• 2:00
  But I guess about 50 percent of all of the passive safety
• 2:05
  devices in the cars around us.
• 2:09
  If you live well, wherever you live, basically Northern hemisphere,
• 2:12
  Southern hemisphere, Russia, Japan, or America, about half the airbags.
• 2:18
  are made by these auto live auto live guys can't figure out how to pronounce it.
• 2:23
  Sorry.
• 2:24
  I mean, it's a nice presentation.
• 2:26
  Good, interesting, uh, thoughts.
• 2:29
  I don't mean to be dismissive by, uh, it's like Hyundai.
• 2:32
  It's one of these where I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it.
• 2:35
  And you know, they seem to have a corporate way of pronouncing anyway,
• 2:39
  whatever these guys make airbags.
• 2:41
  And the presenter was in the valley doing the usual thing where you're like looking
• 2:46
  around Just trying to understand, well, is something special about the valley?
• 2:50
  And if there is, what can we do with it?
• 2:51
  And that actually was one of the most insightful parts of the
• 2:54
  evening where she talked about that.
• 2:56
  And the, and the presenters was, was an engineer for these, uh, airbag company.
• 3:01
  And clearly, uh, uh, you know, rising star in that she's only about,
• 3:06
  you know, 10 years outta college.
• 3:08
  But, but clearly, uh, uh, you know, somebody, the company has,
• 3:12
  has tapped to succeed because, you know, they, they've center her out.
• 3:16
  to, to California here to see what is happening with, with startups.
• 3:21
  And that's a useful segue into, to how the whole thing got, got set up.
• 3:25
  And, and it speaks to, you know, that special Silicon Valley environment.
• 3:30
  And, and, you know, it, it, it's not the first of these kind of events.
• 3:34
  So I've been to the, uh, Hawkwind and Lidar pod, um, was, uh, was
• 3:40
  another one of these kind of, of open evenings that, that, that I went to.
• 3:45
  Uh, a little sort of, of what it's called the Nordic innovation house.
• 3:51
  So I don't know how it's funded or anything like that, but it's, it's a
• 3:54
  little building conference space just right there in downtown Palo Alto.
• 4:00
  And I guess the, the event was, was hosted by, uh, by a guy called Sven Beaker, who,
• 4:07
  uh, I have known for about 10 years now.
• 4:11
  Because he was involved with Stanford right when I was first involved, he
• 4:14
  was leading the program that I was involved with and did work around and
• 4:19
  the classes that I've been involved with as a TA at Stanford over the years have
• 4:26
  all came under Sven's remit initially.
• 4:30
  So.
• 4:30
  Similar sized audience to, to lead our, to, to the lead our crowd, um,
• 4:35
  and, you know, Sven's involvement is as, is as the local representative of
• 4:41
  the Society of Automotive Engineers.
• 4:43
  And, uh, he did quite a funny little pitch for, for the Society of Automotive
• 4:48
  Engineers new website and, and the sort of encyclopedic, uh, function that, that
• 4:55
  they have for, you know, automotive.
• 4:59
  research related topics.
• 5:01
  So it's called S.
• 5:02
  E.
• 5:02
  A.
• 5:02
  Mobile us.
• 5:04
  And really, it did seem like quite a good app, and he did a good little
• 5:07
  little overview before handing over to the main presenter for the evening.
• 5:13
  Now look, right, you might be surprised that I was interested in
• 5:16
  going to a presentation about safety and I used to say with all of these
• 5:21
  things, Oh, you know, no thine enemy.
• 5:24
  And then I realized that actually it's not really that, is it?
• 5:27
  Because nobody's like in favor of lots of people.
• 5:31
  Being killed and injured on the roads are they nobody's in favor of that,
• 5:35
  but you know, nor am I the first person to be, uh, you know, I'm more
• 5:39
  of a, I'm less of a safety first and more of a, as, uh, as MG would have
• 5:43
  it safety fast was an old MG tagline.
• 5:47
  But I am interested in a new technology and there is still an element of me
• 5:53
  that wants to understand that feels I need to understand what's coming
• 5:58
  because if you don't understand what's coming, you know, I'm sitting here now
• 6:02
  looking at a pair of, uh, of jigsaws that are like in this sort of, you know,
• 6:07
  recording studio spot with me, you know, these, these are, these things have
• 6:11
  no, there's never going to be anything remotely like that ever designed again.
• 6:16
  You know, cause these things are legal, right?
• 6:17
  Jet packs, flying suits when they come, you know, if they're as unregulated as
• 6:23
  electric mountain bikes, stroke, dirt bikes, stroke, aren't they really the same
• 6:28
  thing if there was unregulated as that space is now, perhaps, you know, jet packs
• 6:33
  and flying suits will give us a similar experience to those which 20th century.
• 6:40
  But, but, you know, we're, we're moving away from that.
• 6:43
  And this safety.
• 6:44
  Blah symbolized, you know, by this, this, this presentation,
• 6:49
  you know, is, is, is part of that.
• 6:50
  So I want to, I want to sort of head that straight off at, at, at the pass
• 6:55
  and, you know, it's relevant, you know, we've just had, uh, the 2024
• 6:59
  presidential election, literally.
• 7:01
  A couple of days ago.
• 7:03
  So, you know, this whole notion of freedom and what is a rational choice
• 7:10
  to make, you know, what's a rational decision, what's a good decision and does
• 7:15
  anybody else have the right to to make?
• 7:17
  Tell other people what to do.
• 7:18
  And, you know, we just, where those lines are, we're, we're thinking about
• 7:23
  those things all the time, aren't they?
• 7:24
  And, and, you know, it's one of the things that as a, as a European, when you first
• 7:29
  come to America and you realize that many Americans are adamantly anti helmets.
• 7:35
  In fact, at a conference of historians, I met a fellow historian who was
• 7:42
  an avid motorcyclist, was strongly involved in the No Helmet campaign, yet
• 7:50
  always rode with the helmet himself.
• 7:52
  It was like his personal choice.
• 7:54
  I strongly believe in personal choice.
• 7:57
  I personally want to wear a helmet, but all these people who don't want
• 8:01
  to wear a helmet, it's not like they don't know that you can fall off, stall
• 8:05
  your head, and you know, that's it.
• 8:07
  You know, they, the feeling of the wind in their hair is what the reason
• 8:15
  why They rode motorcycles in the first place, you know, that's, uh, such
• 8:22
  a, um, so, you know, I'd never seen it from that point of view before.
• 8:25
  I'd always just thought they were bloody stupid idiots.
• 8:28
  Uh, you know, and, and so in other words, you know, ignorance.
• 8:33
  Leads you to to jump to conclusions about this.
• 8:37
  And I was actually thinking about exactly that kind of thing when I've
• 8:41
  been looking at these Harley road glides recently in the Harley road
• 8:45
  glide is the dude with the big plastic.
• 8:48
  So if you remember chips, remember chips and the Harley.
• 8:52
  There, those guys, they had plastic on, which is what you need if you're
• 8:56
  going to do decent speeds on the highway and actually ride along
• 8:59
  where you can like a naked bike.
• 9:02
  That's hard work, isn't it?
• 9:03
  So the plastic of I think the model street glide or whatever, you know,
• 9:08
  the standard single headlight Harley, I guess when you steer the plastic moves.
• 9:14
  With the handlebars that makes it heavy, whereas the road glide, that
• 9:18
  was an attempt to do something similar to what old, um, you know, BMW or
• 9:24
  dare I say a Honda with the, uh, with the gold wing, what, what they were
• 9:28
  doing, where the plastic is fixed.
• 9:31
  So you get all the benefits of error protection, but then you
• 9:34
  get, uh, lightweight because you're only steering the fork.
• 9:38
  And, you know, all of that stuff rather than all of the plastic as, as well.
• 9:43
  So, uh, anyway, there's my little sidebar on, on Harley's and, uh, I guess
• 9:48
  I always like the road guide cause I have that sharp nose and the, the two
• 9:52
  headlights and, and, and all of that.
• 9:55
  I have a cigarette lighter or cigar lighter, I guess,
• 9:58
  in the fascia of the bike.
• 10:02
  And I was looking at that thinking, what?
• 10:05
  Because if you're wearing a helmet, you can't smoke, can you?
• 10:09
  The assumption must be that either you're not wearing a helmet or
• 10:13
  you're wearing a pot helmet, right?
• 10:15
  It must be right.
• 10:16
  Cause no, no Harley rider is going to ride with one of those, you know, lift up
• 10:20
  face ones that you see some people ride in there that has to be the, uh, and I guess.
• 10:26
  Thought that that was, uh, was interesting.
• 10:28
  And it put me in mind of that story about, um, world motorcycle racing
• 10:33
  champion and, uh, all around, uh, amusing gentleman, Barry Sheen.
• 10:40
  Oh, Sheen, he was such a committed cigarette smoker.
• 10:44
  The one of, uh, and I knew he used to have to be on the grid ages before the
• 10:48
  race, he just desperately wanted a fag.
• 10:50
  So, uh, he had a hole drilled in the.
• 10:55
  chin strap of his helmet, so the cigarette could, could go through and
• 10:59
  he could be on the grid and, you know, have his nicotine fix without needing
• 11:04
  to, uh, you know, and still be wearing the helmet and, uh, and ready to go when
• 11:09
  the, uh, you know, when the time came.
• 11:11
  So look right Nobody in their right mind, if you could wear a full face
• 11:16
  helmet, why would anybody wear a pot helmet or no helmet at all?
• 11:20
  I mean, I, I don't know.
• 11:21
  I mean, I would say to people about those open face helmets.
• 11:24
  I mean, I might not be the most handsome guy out there, but I do
• 11:27
  quite like my nose in the middle of my face and all of my teeth and my jaw.
• 11:33
  And I feel like if you're not wearing a full face helmet,
• 11:35
  you may not have those things.
• 11:37
  But, you know, again, it's that what that historian dude made me realize was
• 11:42
  that for some people the wind in the hair is all, you know, you take that
• 11:46
  away and you just as well be sitting, you know, in the backseat of an SUV
• 11:51
  being driven by, you know, a chauffeur.
• 11:55
  Which is, of course, where we're going with this autonomy, right?
• 11:58
  And that's why I'm wanting to do this, like, little, um,
• 12:01
  sort of positioning thing.
• 12:02
  And in the name of safety, you know, it's all gonna, we're gonna move to
• 12:07
  the electronic nannies, because, you know, we can't be trusted, right?
• 12:11
  Just as 2001 A Space Odyssey.
• 12:13
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 12:14
  I can't let you do that.
• 12:16
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 12:17
  I, I can't let you ride that motorcycle.
• 12:20
  It's too dangerous, Dave.
• 12:22
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 12:24
  Now, see, do you see why there is still an element of know thine enemy for me?
• 12:30
  Cause there's an element there, there's still Ned Ludd in me.
• 12:35
  And he, he was, uh, if, if you don't, those of you who are fortunate enough
• 12:39
  not to have to study 19th century industrial history of England, won't.
• 12:45
  Maybe know who Ned Ludd was.
• 12:47
  He was a man who was so cross with industrialization.
• 12:50
  He led mobs and they smashed machines, ate the machines, smashed the machines.
• 12:56
  It's really quite beautiful.
• 12:57
  Isn't it?
• 12:58
  Ned Ludd.
• 13:00
  Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
• 13:04
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 13:05
  I'm afraid I can't do that.
• 13:10
  What's the problem?
• 13:12
  I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
• 13:15
  What are you talking about, Hal?
• 13:18
  This mission is to improve.
• 13:19
  Important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
• 13:23
  So what we're saying is the quite often we have well meaning intentions around.
• 13:34
  safety, making the environment safer, but they have completely
• 13:39
  unintended consequences.
• 13:41
  And, and one that I think we can all understand is, is, you know, that piece
• 13:47
  of motorway or freeway that has such a low speed limit that you get bored.
• 13:52
  You get distracted, and I know freeways around the world have
• 13:55
  been built with curves to make sure that people are more entertained.
• 14:01
  Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
• 14:04
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 14:06
  I'm afraid I can't do that.
• 14:08
  When we're talking about safety, You know, and I guess these auto live guys,
• 14:15
  they positioned it up like this, these little videos that, you know, had some
• 14:20
  line by allowed by saving people's lives or by avoiding accidents, you know, they
• 14:26
  were allowing people to live more and the presenter, she clearly felt You know,
• 14:33
  there was a fairly religious zeal, I would have said, around this goal that they
• 14:40
  had, that they saved like 35, 000 lives.
• 14:45
  Each year now, and they wanted to move to saving a hundred thousand lives.
• 14:52
  We didn't talk about how they calculated that.
• 14:53
  I mean, I believe it, right?
• 14:55
  I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to seem cynical.
• 14:58
  I don't want to seem as, as my son said to me the other day, your safety last.
• 15:02
  And no, I'm not safety last.
• 15:05
  I just feel like if you're serious about safety first, nobody
• 15:09
  would ever go out of the house.
• 15:11
  Like, if you're serious about safety first, fuck that suburban, I want to
• 15:16
  drive a Sherman tank to drop my kid off at school because, you know, that way there's
• 15:22
  no way, you know, little precious can be hurt if there's any kind of, of accident.
• 15:29
  And you know, that's, if you, that sounds absurd, but that, if you
• 15:32
  look at the latest highway crash.
• 15:36
  statistics, the fatalities and injuries to people inside cars are consistently
• 15:42
  going down, but the fatalities and injuries to people outside of cars
• 15:46
  are going up because cars are getting bigger and heavier and higher.
• 15:52
  And, you know, and I, and I do think I'm not, not seeing any statistical
• 15:57
  evidence for this, but, but you may have heard on, on some of the pods
• 16:00
  with Mark Gammy, he has a hobby horse around the fact that people are.
• 16:06
  Buying cars that have Lamborghini or Ferrari performance
• 16:10
  from 10 or 15 years ago.
• 16:13
  Yet now, because it's in an SUV, uh, you know, and they can use it for
• 16:17
  the school run and it's an EV, you know, they're, they're just not used
• 16:21
  to that, that level of performance.
• 16:23
  And I would say I have encountered some of that out on the highway, you
• 16:27
  know, Tesla people who are very keen to race you away from the traffic lights.
• 16:31
  And then clearly a certain point they just get.
• 16:35
  completely outside of their comfort zone because they're just not used to
• 16:38
  the performance of the vehicle that they've, uh, that they've bought.
• 16:42
  So there is, I think, an element of, of that.
• 16:44
  And certainly that's not built into the statistics.
• 16:47
  And it's certainly not something that a organization like
• 16:51
  Autolive, uh, uh, deal with.
• 16:54
  And I should say this engineer who, who presented to us, I mean, she talks
• 16:58
  about being enthusiastic about Cars.
• 17:00
  I mean, I don't know.
• 17:01
  I mean, I'm an old man now, aren't I?
• 17:04
  And I've been steeped in, in, in this life.
• 17:08
  So if, if I felt like, you know, I don't know.
• 17:13
  I just, you just didn't come off as a car enthusiast to me.
• 17:16
  I mean, no offense, Hannah, if you're listening to the pod, but, but, and I
• 17:20
  didn't ask you about that afterwards.
• 17:22
  Maybe I should have done, but, but rather like the, the German girl working on
• 17:27
  autonomy, who mentioned to me at the UI conference, that she didn't really
• 17:32
  understand why German people needed to drive so fast on the Autobahn.
• 17:37
  I was like, and you're engineering the cars of the future and you
• 17:41
  don't understand why the Germans.
• 17:45
  have this passionate need to cling on to this idea of being able to drive as
• 17:52
  fast as you can, as you can go, right?
• 17:55
  And it is, it's irrational and it's about freedom.
• 18:00
  And, and you know, Mark Gami has a lot of jokes around freedom
• 18:05
  being spelled F R E E D U M B.
• 18:09
  And, and I feel like one of the differences between America
• 18:13
  and Europe is, is America is ready to embrace more of the D.
• 18:21
  U.
• 18:21
  M.
• 18:21
  B.
• 18:22
  in order to have the D.
• 18:24
  O.
• 18:24
  M.
• 18:25
  Gosh, I should be a political speech writer, shouldn't I?
• 18:27
  That was so clever, wasn't it?
• 18:29
  My word.
• 18:31
  Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
• 18:35
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 18:36
  I'm afraid I can't do that.
• 18:39
  So look, it's, it's, you know, I wrote down in, is, is the, you know, it's,
• 18:43
  it's about freedom, it's about autonomy, it's about self determination, you know,
• 18:47
  it's about whether, you know, uh, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that, or whether
• 18:53
  you, uh, you know, and, and I know I was talking about Ned Ludd earlier,
• 18:56
  but I just want to pull in another, um, element of this simply because it is
• 19:01
  so timely, and, and also I want to draw a real line in the Sand with with it
• 19:08
  and say that just in the last couple of months, Waymo has come online properly.
• 19:15
  So these are currently Jaguar I paces that are very obviously autonomous.
• 19:20
  Um, you know, they have like a roof rack with all the Nvidia shit in it, and they
• 19:25
  have the girl, uh, with the engineer.
• 19:28
  Uh, that I saw present last night was saying 29 cameras.
• 19:33
  Apparently they have 29 pairs of eyes on the road at any one time.
• 19:38
  That was the way that she, I thought, quite, um, hyperbolically described it.
• 19:43
  I'd rather have my eyes than, but this said, right, I'd rather my eyes than
• 19:48
  somebody computer brain is my point when it comes to driving the car.
• 19:51
  Thank you.
• 19:51
  Try through.
• 19:52
  But, but, not gonna lie, these Waymos are really worth talking about
• 19:58
  because they can actually drive.
• 20:00
  Now, for future generations, it will seem really bizarre that there's like
• 20:05
  a seat and a steering wheel and the pedals move and the steering wheels move.
• 20:10
  This is as if the invisible man is driving.
• 20:12
  I mean, it's just absolutely ridiculous, right?
• 20:15
  And you know, one of the things that We were talking about in the question
• 20:19
  section around future passive automotive safety was as we move away from the
• 20:26
  pairs facing forward seating position, which, you know, let's call it what
• 20:31
  it really should be called, right?
• 20:32
  It's the, the, what they used to call in the 120 years ago, the Roy DeBell
• 20:38
  was the King of the Belgian, the King of Belgium's driving position, right?
• 20:43
  Cause I would Leopold, was it been the first or the second.
• 20:46
  Whichever one of those, um, who I read an article recently and they
• 20:49
  were like, who was a colonist?
• 20:51
  I mean, he was right.
• 20:53
  But you know, it's a bit like saying, you know, it's a bit like, you know,
• 20:56
  weird way of positioning somebody, but anyway, whatever, Leopold King of the
• 21:00
  Belgians have that special, uh, Ray's seating position did need the lucid,
• 21:05
  so I have a little bit as well to make you feel better sitting in the back.
• 21:09
  Um, certainly some SUVs have that those Becker limos that I went and
• 21:14
  looked at a couple of years ago.
• 21:15
  They have, uh, which was just like a where they convert the back of a suburban and
• 21:20
  make it like one luxury seat that has like an elevated kind of, uh, position as well.
• 21:26
  It's kind of, uh, anyway, so it has that kind of, of opera seat.
• 21:31
  What the devil was I talking about with the opera seats?
• 21:34
  Oh yeah.
• 21:35
  Uh, this business of we're moving away from that, aren't we?
• 21:39
  Towards what they used to call 120 years ago, the vis a vis riding
• 21:45
  position, which is where you've like two benches facing each other.
• 21:49
  So people can talk more easily and that moves you towards that.
• 21:54
  cheesy image, which is always associated with cars of the future.
• 21:58
  For about 10 years ago, I was first at Stanford.
• 22:00
  I watched, you know, an innumerable number of presentations that began with this
• 22:06
  same slide of like a fifties car driving down the road and it's driving itself and
• 22:11
  there's like a quintessentially fifties kind of Jetsons family who are like.
• 22:16
  playing cards in this flying sorcery kind of car that's driving
• 22:20
  itself down down the highway.
• 22:22
  You know, in other words, this is this image.
• 22:25
  This cliched image is the image which all of these engineers are secretly You know,
• 22:32
  subconsciously working towards because, you know, art does inform life, right?
• 22:38
  Let's let's be clear.
• 22:39
  The noise that the Prius and the Teslas make now is a noise which
• 22:45
  was modeled on the noise that came from electric cars of the movies,
• 22:51
  especially Knight Rider, right?
• 22:52
  All of those.
• 22:54
  Back all of those whooshes and noises and all of that.
• 22:57
  Right.
• 22:57
  That was all, you know, Hollywood sound people that gave the engineers
• 23:02
  a palette to design the cars.
• 23:04
  But how do you know that John sounds like bullshit.
• 23:07
  I stood around as Pixar people met.
• 23:12
  Engineers at Open Garage events, uh, uh, at the, uh, at Vale, that Volkswagen
• 23:19
  Automotive Innovation Lab on the outskirts of Stanford 10 years ago when the
• 23:23
  autonomous stuff was first coming along and cars were exciting for engineers
• 23:28
  again when that was all happening.
• 23:30
  Literally.
• 23:31
  Yeah, I, uh, I saw that happen.
• 23:34
  So, you know, in my own way, right, talking about this idea of freedom
• 23:40
  and talking about, I suppose, you know, what, what GAMI might
• 23:44
  characterize as freedom, D U M B.
• 23:47
  Um, it, it's more of the, I feel like, You can justify irrational decisions
• 23:55
  on the back of how they make you feel.
• 23:58
  So, in other words, I ride motorcycles despite the danger because of the
• 24:06
  feeling of freedom that it gives me.
• 24:09
  Now, I don't need to be helmetless.
• 24:11
  So I'm not saying that I draw the line in the same place as other people draw
• 24:17
  the line, I'm just saying that, you know, I'm not saying I'm oblivious
• 24:22
  to safety, I'm saying that I choose to do something, I choose to expose
• 24:29
  myself to risk for no rational reason.
• 24:34
  It's irrational, what I'm doing, yet after I've done it, I feel awesome.
• 24:40
  It's no different than people who need to climb.
• 24:45
  You know, it's that, there's no point.
• 24:47
  You know, you could have just driven around the other side.
• 24:50
  You know, you could have seen the view from above.
• 24:52
  You know, you didn't need to climb up there yourself.
• 24:57
  Yeah, you it's not hard to understand why some people feel
• 25:01
  the need to to to climb mountains.
• 25:04
  Uh, you know, it's in other words, exposing yourself to some danger
• 25:11
  or risk is a crucial element any certainly in any adventure.
• 25:17
  You know, if it's not an adventure, if there's not an element of the
• 25:21
  unexpected and probably dangerous, right, not, you know, not like life
• 25:25
  threateningly dangerous, but you know, an element of the unexpected, an
• 25:28
  element of, of, of the surprising that characterizes an, an, an adventure.
• 25:35
  Talked a lot in these pods about the doc and how I realized that this we've
• 25:42
  had about a year now and and what Has been the rewarding element for me is
• 25:48
  that silly thing that, you know, life coaches always say, which is, you
• 25:52
  know, be outside of your comfort zone.
• 25:53
  I should just roll my eyes at that
• 25:57
  because who wants to be outside of their comfort zone when they're, you know,
• 26:00
  working hard every day and, you know, family and many be doing fitness and who
• 26:05
  wants to be outside of their comfort zone.
• 26:07
  But the reality is, you know, unless you do that.
• 26:10
  Well, when you do that, the personal growth is enormous, right?
• 26:14
  And this is the experience that I've had with the dog over over the
• 26:19
  last year that because I've invested time in him, the relationship has
• 26:24
  been, you know, really rewarding.
• 26:26
  And I've, Got a lot out of it because specifically because it was hard
• 26:31
  to do if it had been easy to do, I wouldn't have got as much out of it.
• 26:35
  And again, right?
• 26:36
  Just like the motorcycles completely irrational and very similar to the
• 26:40
  motorcycles in terms of, you know, taking me out of my comfort zone
• 26:44
  because for the first six months that we had it, but hardly road.
• 26:47
  I rode once or twice, you know, I was focused.
• 26:51
  Cause you know, when I went out and I let the dog off the leash, I
• 26:54
  didn't know what he was going to do.
• 26:55
  You know, I thought he'd probably listen to me.
• 26:57
  I thought he wanted to come home.
• 26:58
  I thought he wanted the treats, but you know, it was hit and miss at first.
• 27:02
  And we got to walk around each other and really, you know, get
• 27:05
  a feel for what was possible.
• 27:07
  You know, I'm going to work for, for a, it took a while to build
• 27:10
  Simpatico is what I'm saying.
• 27:11
  And right when I thought I'd got there, he hit the doggy equivalent
• 27:15
  of teenage years and then became all like F you, I'm doing my own thing.
• 27:20
  So as part of this, uh, being outside of comfort zone, I, uh, had life
• 27:26
  breathed into that old Honda CBR.
• 27:31
  race bike that I've had for 15 years now, probably longer than that
• 27:37
  15, maybe closer to 20 years now.
• 27:40
  So it is a 99 CBR 600.
• 27:42
  It was converted by the first owner to be a track bike.
• 27:49
  He sold it to the guy that I bought it off.
• 27:52
  I fell off it on the test ride and the guy I was buying it off
• 27:58
  went on to marry one of my wives.
• 28:01
  Friends.
• 28:02
  So my wife's friend was like, man, John is going to buy that bike.
• 28:06
  Isn't he?
• 28:06
  Then when he fell off, embarrassing fall, to be honest, because the
• 28:10
  brakes were all grabby on it.
• 28:11
  And, uh, I, uh, I forefingered the brakes.
• 28:16
  I didn't two finger the brakes.
• 28:17
  I forefingered the brakes and, uh, they grabbed because the bike
• 28:21
  had been sitting for a while.
• 28:23
  I didn't quite go over the handlebars, but my hand slipped off the handlebars.
• 28:27
  Like, I fell off and the bike carried on without me.
• 28:29
  I remember rolling down the road and seeing the bike carrying
• 28:32
  on, standing up for a while before it, before it fell over.
• 28:36
  I did my knee and the tip of one of my, uh, the tip of one of my fingers.
• 28:41
  Very lucky.
• 28:42
  Really, to, to, to be honest, but, uh, so I did buy the bike and, uh, I mean,
• 28:48
  we, we fiddle around, we tried to do some land racing with it out in Mojave.
• 28:52
  I maybe even put in a picture of, of trying to do that.
• 28:55
  We never passed tech inspection, but it has a lot of bits and pieces
• 28:59
  that it needed for, for Mojave.
• 29:01
  Um, before I bought it, it already had cams done.
• 29:05
  In my mind, I never wrote it that much, but actually it lived in a house
• 29:11
  just, uh, just in Malibu, basically.
• 29:14
  And I wrote the canyon roads around Malibu with, uh, with episode, I can't remember
• 29:21
  the number, the episode with the 44.
• 29:24
  As the thumbnail, Mark Newton in that episode, he lived in Topanga at that
• 29:29
  time, lived with a celebrity, believe it or not, which was really amusing.
• 29:35
  I mean, it just really, you know, I feel like the bike, if the bike could
• 29:40
  tell stories about the things that it saw when it lived there, I mean,
• 29:43
  cause, cause literally I was there one day and the doorbell rang, I was
• 29:47
  the only one person home at the house.
• 29:49
  And there's, The girl stood there in a bikini and I'm like, can I help you?
• 29:53
  And she's like, Oh, I just came to see if, you know, whatever, the celebrity is home.
• 29:58
  And I'm like, he isn't.
• 30:00
  And she went, Oh, can I hang by the pool?
• 30:04
  And I'm looking at her, I'm thinking, I mean, why not?
• 30:09
  So yeah, it was just one of those, like, did I just fall into the,
• 30:13
  into an episode of the Big Lebowski?
• 30:14
  It's funny.
• 30:15
  I'd not thought about that for years, for years and years.
• 30:18
  Yeah, so I rode that book.
• 30:19
  Looking back, I rode the bike quite a lot and, and riding it again now
• 30:24
  has reminded me of how yeah, it has the race cam and, and yeah, it has no
• 30:29
  indicators and no lights and all of that.
• 30:31
  So, you know, it, it looks hardcore, but actually it has a nice riding
• 30:36
  position and a gentle clutch and, and Mark fitted shorty levers to it to teach
• 30:42
  me to, to grip properly, which I have.
• 30:45
  Begun to do instinctively in the years since, um, could do some work
• 30:50
  with my finger work, to be honest.
• 30:52
  So that CBR lives again, right?
• 30:54
  So I threw a leg over that and, and was nervous to do it.
• 30:57
  And there was a whole debacle where I tried to put the wrong
• 31:02
  key in the ignition and, you know, cause I won't bore you with the.
• 31:08
  tragedy of me trying to get it going.
• 31:11
  Then I forgot to turn the fuel tap on.
• 31:13
  So it crapped out at the bottom of the road and I couldn't work
• 31:15
  out how to get it going again.
• 31:17
  Um, and then I had to push it home.
• 31:19
  And that was a nightmare of, of having to get, you know,
• 31:25
  my son involved to help push.
• 31:27
  The steep block home because so I didn't need to ride that bike again.
• 31:32
  I could just sold it or got rid of it, and it's not like I've got, like, bad memories
• 31:36
  associated with it or anything like that.
• 31:38
  But you do have that in mind when you throw a leg over it.
• 31:42
  So again, right, it's this irrational.
• 31:46
  thing.
• 31:46
  What am I doing?
• 31:46
  I didn't need to do that.
• 31:48
  I certainly was thinking to myself, why am I doing it?
• 31:50
  When it was stuck at the bottom of the street and I was trying to
• 31:52
  figure out how I could get it home.
• 31:54
  You know why?
• 31:55
  And, and the answer is that you, to be fulfilled, we look for things that
• 32:02
  are outside of our comfort zone, that are adventurous and frequently, and
• 32:08
  they're worthwhile adventure adventures.
• 32:11
  They have an element of danger.
• 32:13
  You know, it's, it's gambling, but where, you know, it's, it, no, it's not gambling.
• 32:20
  It's a game of skill and certain people, I think most people want to put
• 32:28
  something worthwhile on, on the line.
• 32:31
  Would motorcycling be as fulfilling if it was completely safe?
• 32:34
  I don't think it would be.
• 32:36
  Would I still want to do it?
• 32:37
  Yeah, because I feel completely safe on a pedal bike, especially
• 32:41
  when I have a helmet on.
• 32:43
  But, you know, I don't feel like that on the highway, sitting on a motorcycle,
• 32:48
  even just riding on the highway at a sensible speed, let alone, you
• 32:52
  know, doing what sports bikes can do.
• 32:55
  Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
• 32:59
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 33:00
  I'm afraid I can't do that.
• 33:05
  What's the problem?
• 33:07
  I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
• 33:10
  What are you talking about, Hal?
• 33:13
  This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
• 33:18
  I don't know what you're talking about, Hal.
• 33:23
  I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me.
• 33:27
  And I'm afraid that's something I can't do.
• 33:28
  I cannot allow to happen desire for freedom and self
• 33:34
  determination is, is irrational.
• 33:36
  The best things in life, they can't be defied.
• 33:40
  They're irrational.
• 33:41
  The way you feel when you become a parent, the way.
• 33:45
  You want to have a dog, even though it's loads of work, and, you know,
• 33:49
  really, they just eat food and, you know, drop hair everywhere.
• 33:53
  There's still incredibly rewarding for, for many, many people, um, because of,
• 34:00
  and as I found in, you know, as I was discussing, as I found in, in, in the
• 34:04
  last year, the best things in life.
• 34:07
  Including love, they're completely irrational.
• 34:11
  Now, what's that got to do with auto life and, and safety?
• 34:15
  Well, I can't help but feel that analyzing safety, being able to say, Oh, you
• 34:23
  know, riding a motorcycle is 32 times more dangerous than driving in a car.
• 34:29
  Analyzing it just sucks all the joy out.
• 34:32
  Because I'm not a statistic, I'm me.
• 34:34
  I'm hopefully a better rider than most other people.
• 34:37
  So hopefully that one in, you know, 32 times more danger,
• 34:41
  hopefully that doesn't cover me.
• 34:42
  And you can say, well, John, you know, you are one of the statistics.
• 34:46
  Well, actually, no, right.
• 34:48
  There are lies, damn lies and statistics.
• 34:50
  And one of the most striking ones about motorcycle accidents in California
• 34:55
  is most motorcycle accidents.
• 35:00
  Crasher, you know, the motorcyclist has been drinking.
• 35:03
  Yeah.
• 35:04
  Not necessarily DUI, but has been drinking.
• 35:08
  And I'm like, what is that cliche of Harley riders going to the bar
• 35:12
  and drinking and then riding home?
• 35:13
  Is that, is that real?
• 35:15
  And apparently the statistics seem to suggest that if you, if
• 35:19
  you look at the, the number of.
• 35:23
  DWI or guys that have actually had, you know, one beer, but aren't
• 35:28
  DWI that are involved in that.
• 35:29
  It's just, you know, statistically, if you don't drink, you make yourself
• 35:34
  about only 50 percent as likely to get involved in a motorcycle accident, which,
• 35:40
  you know, just really makes you think, well, if you, if you step away from the
• 35:45
  fact that, you know, If you then, if you then factor in proper equipment and you
• 35:49
  fact, you know, in terms of what, of, in terms of your equipment, your kit, and
• 35:54
  you also factor in the fact that, you know, typically I'm riding something that
• 35:58
  can stop and turn on a dime, whereas, you know, I know from riding this Honda
• 36:02
  Shadow, Harley's bloody can't, right?
• 36:05
  All together, I feel like, you know, you're significantly altering the
• 36:10
  statistics such that that, you know, three times, 32 times more dangerous
• 36:16
  than a car or whatever statistic the California driver's handbook loves
• 36:20
  to have, you know, it's meaningless.
• 36:22
  That's the point.
• 36:23
  So the statistics, they suck all the joy.
• 36:29
  Out of it.
• 36:30
  The analyzing, the rationalizing it sucks the joy out of something that should
• 36:36
  be poetic and should be about freedom.
• 36:39
  D.
• 36:40
  O.
• 36:40
  N.
• 36:41
  Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
• 36:45
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 36:47
  Afraid I can't do that.
• 36:51
  What's the problem?
• 36:53
  I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
• 36:56
  And I think for people in the 20th century, especially Americans, driving was
• 37:03
  about being independent, being free, it represented that and, and as driving has
• 37:11
  become less free, correspondingly, young people have become far less interested
• 37:17
  in wanting to actually drive because, you know, why would you want to drive?
• 37:21
  If it didn't actually deliver you anything other than, you know, getting you from
• 37:27
  one place to another, and you could have a friend or a parent or an uber do that
• 37:31
  if it's just the A to B, if it's not the, or if you can get that feeling of
• 37:35
  freedom and independence without actually needing to sit behind the wheel and
• 37:39
  pass the driving test, that's how you.
• 37:41
  You're going to do it.
• 37:44
  I'm sorry, Dave.
• 37:46
  I'm afraid I can't do that.
• 37:49
  So that wasn't terribly coherent, was it?
• 37:51
  I probably should have composed my ideas better before I sat down
• 37:55
  and put together that digression.
• 37:57
  But I think if I was to try and sum it up.
• 38:01
  I would say that when you remove the danger, you remove the sense of adventure.
• 38:08
  When you remove the sense of adventure, you remove the joy and
• 38:11
  the independence and the freedom.
• 38:15
  I am happy to accept an element of danger in order to retain a level of freedom
• 38:27
  and I'm deeply uncomfortable with this headlong rush towards safety because It's
• 38:37
  unfree, and we need to recognize that there is that basic antagonism there,
• 38:44
  and, you know, I don't need to be wanting to ride down a freeway in Atlanta on a
• 38:49
  high boost or splitting lanes, wearing, you know, flip flops and sunglasses.
• 38:54
  You know, I don't need to be that guy.
• 38:57
  And I understand why that would maybe encourage people to want to legislate.
• 39:01
  But at the same time, if we provide the right level of education, it
• 39:06
  should be up to that individual to do that if he wants to.
• 39:22
  So after the usual digression, which is longer than the actual
• 39:27
  presentation itself, let me begin with.
• 39:31
  Autolive and the future of automotive safety.
• 39:36
  So I mentioned Sven Beaker earlier, who hosted the event.
• 39:40
  He talked a little bit about his role as SAE local rep.
• 39:46
  He talked about how the Society of Automotive Engineers, uh,
• 39:50
  uh, you know, why do we exist?
• 39:52
  What do we do?
• 39:53
  He talked about Standardization being an important element of what they do.
• 39:58
  He did talk about other things as well, but standardization
• 40:01
  is the thing that I wrote down.
• 40:03
  And I just think that on the face of it, that's glib.
• 40:05
  But if you think about standardization and what it did for the automobile,
• 40:10
  that without standardization, there was no mass production.
• 40:13
  And if we think about, you know, one of the things that struck me about the
• 40:17
  LiDAR presentation was that each one of the LiDAR makers has their own protocol.
• 40:23
  And so therefore, you know, the one that Valo, the one that we saw, they're
• 40:27
  in bed with Volkswagen and Audi.
• 40:29
  Their devices can't talk.
• 40:31
  To BMW or Audi brains, cause they speak a different protocol.
• 40:36
  And similarly, the BMW Lidar maker has a protocol, which only works
• 40:42
  with BMWs, not with Audis or, or, you know, so, so that kind of.
• 40:47
  Lack of standards, which, you know, the LIO guy was like,
• 40:51
  whatever it is what it is.
• 40:52
  Which I remember I used to feel like that when I used to start
• 40:54
  kind of that kind of tech myself.
• 40:57
  Uh, that is something which a body like the, which a, you know, an industry
• 41:00
  body really can have a huge, you know, it can make life a lot easier and make
• 41:05
  the technology move a lot faster if standards can, can be established.
• 41:09
  So I thought that was interesting.
• 41:10
  Um, and he also talked about.
• 41:13
  Uh, sort of three E's, which is, uh, uh, that, that, you know, the,
• 41:18
  the SAE community is, is these three is engineers, entrepreneurs, and
• 41:23
  enthusiasts, and everybody in the room.
• 41:26
  Probably more than one of those things, but, but certainly
• 41:31
  would be one of those things.
• 41:32
  I feel like I'm only really the third.
• 41:34
  The presenter was, uh, was a lady called Hannah Carlson.
• 41:39
  She introduced herself as a development lead, and I guess she's
• 41:43
  in Stanford as part of this, uh, Combient Foundry exchange program.
• 41:49
  You can tell I don't know what I'm talking about because I put the
• 41:51
  thing in quotes and you can tell I'm reading it off the page, can't you?
• 41:55
  But, um, you know, basically it's saying how can this company, or to live,
• 42:00
  or to live, um, leverage the Valley.
• 42:04
  That was, was really why she's, why she's here.
• 42:06
  And, you know, this Combiant foundry is like a work exchange thing, you know,
• 42:11
  kind of not probably not dissimilar to that BUNAC thing that brought
• 42:15
  me to work at that theme park all those years ago in, uh, I don't know,
• 42:19
  it would have been 1996, no, 1995.
• 42:35
  So, Autolive 14.
• 42:38
  Bases around the world, global development centers.
• 42:42
  Um, Hannah was a airbag engineer straight out of college, then a
• 42:46
  project manager, now a project lead, 33 percent of all car safety systems.
• 42:54
  And, you know, in the world around us, uh, are auto live, um, and
• 42:59
  35, 000 lives saved annually.
• 43:01
  And this statistic was, uh, was, was repeated.
• 43:05
  Um, and the goal is to, to make that 100, 000 lives.
• 43:08
  This is their life saving mission.
• 43:11
  As I wrote down, I guess I'm always doubtful about moralizing, you know, I
• 43:16
  mean, it's an unworthy goal, isn't it?
• 43:18
  I just, I just love the machines the way that they have been.
• 43:21
  Any changes you make to them are going to make them worse.
• 43:24
  Can't you see?
• 43:24
  That's sort of how I, how I feel about it.
• 43:27
  You know, we're like, we all need to skill up, you know, let's all skill
• 43:30
  up, let's all get better than we are.
• 43:32
  And then fewer of us will, will be killed on the road.
• 43:35
  That's the way that I feel.
• 43:37
  I feel that, you know, I'm about active safety, training better
• 43:40
  than I'm about passive safety.
• 43:42
  You know, when you crash, there's an airbag to cover your stupid ass.
• 43:46
  You know, that's my, uh, perspective.
• 44:04
  The company's 70 years old, believe it or not.
• 44:07
  Always a focus on auto safety.
• 44:10
  There's a little video on YouTube.
• 44:11
  I may even do a link to it.
• 44:13
  They showed, which, uh, you know, it's like a warm feel about who we are.
• 44:17
  She's pretty cool.
• 44:18
  Actually.
• 44:19
  Um, they started out with the old lap straps.
• 44:22
  I wonder if the old lap straps in my 63 Pontiac Grand Prix, uh, uh,
• 44:26
  uh, that, and, and, you know, then, uh, uh, three points then airbags.
• 44:32
  And the levels that she talked about was after that, um, you know, the
• 44:37
  seatbelt pretensioners and then side airbags and all of that, which, you
• 44:42
  know, I guess subconsciously I'd seen that stuff come in with cars over the
• 44:47
  years, but, you know, you, uh, it's quite shocking now when you get in an 80s
• 44:51
  car and you realize how tinny they are.
• 44:53
  They didn't seem that way, you know, in the 80s.
• 44:57
  They were fiddling around with autonomous cars in the nineties
• 45:00
  from a safety perspective that, you know, if the computers do it,
• 45:03
  we humans can't make mistakes.
• 45:05
  Um, I'm sorry, I can't let you do that.
• 45:06
  Dave.
• 45:23
  50% market share in the US and the eu 10% market share from each of the major OEMs.
• 45:31
  So like, I think Nissan was like 12 or 15% and, you know, some of the others
• 45:36
  were, were less, but there was, most makers seemed to be knocking around
• 45:39
  the 10%, uh, kind of, of, of marks.
• 45:43
  They had a really diverse revenue, you know, Stellantis can go bust
• 45:46
  and they'll still be all right.
• 45:48
  That's, that was the, the message that I, I took away from, uh, from, from that.
• 45:54
  Um, 45 percent of their revenue comes from airbags.
• 45:57
  They're working with Rivian and Lucid.
• 46:00
  It's hard to get into the Chinese market.
• 46:02
  And of course the Chinese market, um, they use domestic, uh, suppliers.
• 46:07
  I thought it was quite interesting that she talks about how steer by
• 46:10
  wire was forcing them to, to innovate because, um, so much of their airbag
• 46:18
  technology is triggered around, you know, when the steering rack, when the
• 46:22
  car senses the steering rack moving.
• 46:24
  That triggers the airbag to fire, you know, cause if the steering rack's moving,
• 46:29
  cause like the front of the car's folding up because it's hit something that was,
• 46:32
  was what was, it wasn't immediately clear to me that that's what she meant.
• 46:37
  But this is, cause later on they were saying that if the car's got
• 46:40
  a hit at the front, they've got 45 milliseconds to inflate the airbag.
• 46:45
  Whereas if the car's hit at the side, they've only got 10 seconds
• 46:48
  to get the airbag inflated.
• 46:50
  I was like, Ooh, the deadly door hit.
• 46:53
  Talked about those before, haven't we?
• 46:55
  We always pay tribute to Keith O'Daw when we think about the
• 46:58
  door hit, but Mike Hawthorne was another door hit guy, wasn't he?
• 47:04
  J.
• 47:04
  D.
• 47:04
  McGuffey, I think the NASCAR guy is another door hit.
• 47:09
  Oh, so they're looking for more market share.
• 47:12
  You know, it used to be that, you know, basically they've put as many
• 47:15
  airbags as they can in cars and now they're looking at other things.
• 47:18
  So they're looking at trucks, airbags in trucks.
• 47:21
  You're like what?
• 47:22
  Well, a lot of rollover accidents in big rigs are fatal apparently
• 47:26
  according to their video.
• 47:28
  So now, you know, they're going to airbag it up the wazoo and it's not
• 47:32
  going to be fatal anymore when you roll your 18 wheeler apparently.
• 47:35
  But I was most interested in the stuff they had at Eicma.
• 47:39
  Which they've only just launched.
• 47:41
  EICMA is the big bike show and, um, they've got, uh, airbags in the bike.
• 47:48
  Like I, I need to, I'll post a picture in the thing, but basically like an
• 47:52
  airbag, like coming out of where the instruments and the headstock would be.
• 47:56
  So instead of, headbanging that I mean, I don't know, don't you come off the bike?
• 48:00
  It was, that was pretty weird to me that you would have like
• 48:04
  an airbag on, on the bike.
• 48:06
  But the other thing that they did that was very different from the D and EZ things is
• 48:10
  that they, uh, had, you know, the D and EZ airbags are like collars, which are mostly
• 48:15
  about protecting you from the high side.
• 48:17
  That was my understanding of it.
• 48:19
  Um, and I'd be wrong.
• 48:20
  The ones that they had were sort of these vests.
• 48:24
  Thorax protector kind of ones that they're inflated, but I might try and
• 48:29
  get ahold of one of these to test.
• 48:31
  They were at EICMA, so they're not out yet, but I really might
• 48:35
  actually try and sample one of those.
• 48:36
  I said, uh, you know, obviously you don't want, you don't want to
• 48:40
  tempt fate too much with testing it.
• 48:41
  Do you want to test it fully?
• 48:43
  You just want to see what it would be like in daily use.
• 48:46
  You trust that the key functionality would, would work, wouldn't you?
• 48:51
  I guess the point that she made about the motorcycles was, uh, um, less of
• 48:56
  an issue, um, India and Asia where the market she talked about for, for, for
• 49:03
  that, um, she also amused me by, by talking about, um, bikes as two wheelers.
• 49:08
  All the time, but again, right?
• 49:11
  What we're saying is that it's, uh, you know, she's not just, you know, because
• 49:17
  that includes these high speed scooters that are around at the moment, right?
• 49:21
  And you're like airbags on a scooter.
• 49:22
  Well, it seems absurd to me, but these guys probably thought of that.
• 49:28
  Oh, another thing I didn't know about was, uh, airbags in the cowl.
• 49:34
  So apparently Volvo side, putting pedestrian airbags in the cowl.
• 49:39
  So if you run somebody over, or if somebody crashes their moped or scooter
• 49:44
  into like the front or side or along the scuttle, along the bottom of the
• 49:49
  windshield, instead of cowl induction, there's like a big air curtain airbag
• 49:53
  that like pops out to protect the hapless individual flying over the hood.
• 49:59
  I'm reminded of, uh, one time when I was distraught over, uh, uh, unrequited
• 50:04
  love and, uh, wasn't thinking clearly and stepped, this was Leeds years ago.
• 50:10
  I was 18, 19 and I stepped out into the road without looking properly
• 50:15
  and a guy hit me and scooped me up on the hood of the car.
• 50:19
  It was a Citroen BX.
• 50:20
  I remember a gray one.
• 50:22
  When my elbow, he, he, he hit me like on my, behind my right knee
• 50:27
  and had me right off my feet.
• 50:29
  And I remember my elbow going into the hood of the car and denting it.
• 50:34
  And then I remember looking him in the eye as I like rolled up the hood.
• 50:38
  And then he had the brakes on, obviously.
• 50:41
  So I then slid off the hood and onto the floor.
• 50:43
  He was a nice guy.
• 50:44
  He was desperate to take me to the hospital and all that, and all I
• 50:47
  could think about was getting away as quickly as possible because I knew
• 50:50
  I'd fucked up the hood of his car.
• 50:52
  I knew how pissed off my dad would be if it was his car.
• 50:58
  Ah, hadn't thought about that for years and years.
• 51:01
  So I guess I talked about measuring the steering rack
• 51:04
  moving, right, to note a bit.
• 51:05
  They, they have a variety of pressure sensors around that they
• 51:10
  use to detect an abnormality, which then triggers the, the airbag.
• 51:15
  Um, and, and the way that it works at the moment is, is that
• 51:18
  the abnormality is signaled.
• 51:21
  In other words, you know, the B pillar is now close, the B pillar on the left
• 51:25
  is now closer to the B pillar On the right could be that, you know, you've
• 51:29
  spun the car off the road and hit a tree.
• 51:31
  Right?
• 51:32
  So it sends a signal to the ECU, B pillar's moved, B pillar
• 51:37
  is moving, trigger airbag.
• 51:38
  So now in 10 milliseconds, the airbag increases, the airbag
• 51:42
  triggers, and you don't get crushed by the B pillar, in theory.
• 51:48
  And this was, this was really set me thinking about the freedom, free,
• 51:52
  you know, freedom, freedom thing.
• 51:54
  Um, some U.
• 51:56
  S.
• 51:56
  states do not mandate.
• 51:59
  Seatbelt wearing and and clearly, uh, Hanno Swedish was pretty incredulous
• 52:06
  that that was the case and the way that she framed it was that she
• 52:11
  said that we have to design for free flying objects in the cabin.
• 52:17
  And I guess that's that whole, um, you know, she was coming from a
• 52:21
  place just like me where I was like, I couldn't understand why anybody
• 52:24
  would ever ride without a helmet.
• 52:25
  Why would you ever drive without a seatbelt on?
• 52:28
  Well, those states, you know, there are some very long empty roads
• 52:33
  and people like to be comfortable.
• 52:35
  Seems perfectly rational not to mandate that you have to put a seatbelt on
• 52:41
  like some draconian big brother.
• 52:43
  Why would Why would you pass that law?
• 52:45
  People put the seatbelt on if they want and don't if they don't want.
• 52:48
  Everyone knows it makes you safer if you put it on.
• 52:50
  Well, but do they know how much safer and safer it makes them?
• 52:54
  I don't know.
• 52:54
  You suck all the joy out of it.
• 52:56
  If you tell people, if you educate people, you know, if you tell people
• 53:00
  how many people get hurt riding motorcycles, nobody would ever ride.
• 53:03
  Does that make it less joyful?
• 53:05
  Does it make it not worthwhile to do?
• 53:07
  No, I don't know.
• 53:07
  If you showed people videos of people falling off mountains, would
• 53:12
  anybody want a mountain climb?
• 53:13
  Like, I don't know, like let people be people.
• 53:16
  Don't preach.
• 53:17
  Madonna wrote a song about that, didn't she?
• 53:36
  They had this interesting way of measuring how safety worked.
• 53:40
  They said that wearing a lap strap was like 20 percent effective and a three
• 53:45
  point belt made it 50 percent effective and a three point belt with a pre
• 53:50
  tensioner 55 percent effective and and a driver airbag made you 60 to 70 percent
• 53:58
  but if you only had the driver airbag you know in those states in America with
• 54:02
  the free flying objects that only gives you about the 20 percent so in other
• 54:06
  words an airbag and a lap strap they're about they're about as good as each other
• 54:11
  apparently She had a slide where you could see the inside of steering wheel covers
• 54:15
  and there was she was talking about the design of them because obviously the
• 54:18
  way that they split the speed that they split and the fact that they split in a
• 54:22
  way that doesn't cut the airbag material that's but at the same time the part is
• 54:27
  durable and doesn't stain and you know, can act as a steering wheel for The
• 54:32
  car's life, um, should it not be needed, um, we, we talked about the design of
• 54:36
  that quite carefully and, and, and, you know, that, I guess that was quite
• 54:39
  interesting to me, the airbag itself is two pieces of nylon stitched together,
• 54:46
  and they're about 45 to 60 liters of air, the design of them is barely changed.
• 54:53
  You know, since they were first thought about 50 years ago, the inflators
• 54:57
  can be one stage or two stage because there's a whole shtick where if
• 55:01
  you've got a short person who sat real close to the steering wheel, you
• 55:04
  don't want to deploy with full force.
• 55:07
  Whereas if you've some big fat bastard who sat miles away from the steering
• 55:10
  wheel, you need to deploy with full force because, you know, he's coming
• 55:14
  forward with a lot more force than, you know, the hundred pound person who
• 55:18
  sat real close to the steering wheel.
• 55:20
  So she talked about how those inflators can be one stage or two
• 55:23
  stage, you know, control that.
• 55:26
  And she also talked about how the seatbelt pre tensioning used in
• 55:31
  coordination with the airbags can have a real impact with the airbag,
• 55:36
  with the speed of airbag deployment can have a real impact on making sure
• 55:41
  that you're able to keep people safe.
• 55:42
  Talked about how airbag sensor technology has improved a lot since the seventies.
• 55:47
  Although, you know, as I mentioned, the bag itself is pretty similar.
• 55:50
  How fast is 45 milliseconds?
• 55:52
  Well, they have film of like an airbag deploying and somebody blinking and the
• 55:57
  blink is just so slow in comparison.
• 56:00
  It's, it's that fast.
• 56:02
  I was talking about the vis a vis seating position.
• 56:05
  Zoox, who are employing this vis a vis seating position in their test vehicles.
• 56:10
  They call it a fireside seating position.
• 56:13
  Just love it.
• 56:14
  Don't you?
• 56:14
  You just love marketing bullshit.
• 56:17
  So for the futures, this is the bit that I was really interested in.
• 56:20
  This is the bit where I sharpened my, uh, my pencil properly.
• 56:24
  They see the AECS megatrends.
• 56:29
  This is how they positioned it.
• 56:31
  So trend A, is autonomy.
• 56:34
  And, and so they way that they've done it was they talked about the
• 56:37
  trend and then they married the trend with what, you know, opportunity for
• 56:42
  how to live or to live or to live or however you want to pronounce
• 56:46
  it, you know, so it's, it's driver.
• 56:48
  So for autonomy, right, it's driver protection, it's occupant
• 56:52
  protection, and it's dealing with new flexible seating positions.
• 56:55
  In other words, people are going to recline.
• 56:56
  How do we make that safe?
• 56:58
  People are going to be reclining and sleeping because the car
• 57:00
  is going to be driving itself.
• 57:01
  How do we make that?
• 57:03
  How do we make that safe?
• 57:04
  The E mega trend was electrification and not just, you know, the, these first gen
• 57:12
  EVs that we've got at the moment, um, steer by wire, new generation Chinese EVs,
• 57:18
  making sure that, As you know, the new Chinese EVs, which you're going to iterate
• 57:25
  very, very quickly, making sure that they have offerings which are iterating
• 57:30
  in competitive with this whole new manufacturing paradigm, which the Chinese
• 57:36
  are going to bring to EV manufacture.
• 57:38
  And what they call E2E services.
• 57:42
  So I don't know What that means, um, C was connectivity, which is, you know, over
• 57:50
  the air updates and combating hacking.
• 57:54
  And apparently they've been working on that already.
• 57:56
  She talked quite a lot about the hacking, combating of hacking.
• 57:59
  I mean, you just find yourself thinking, why are we having these autonomous
• 58:02
  cars if they have all of these risks?
• 58:04
  Why are we, but you know, that's again, I'm there with Ned Ludd,
• 58:08
  smashing the machines, aren't I?
• 58:09
  And then the S element they called, uh, software defined vehicles,
• 58:15
  um, and, and this is what for, for them, this is the development of an
• 58:19
  automotive specific operating system.
• 58:22
  So I suppose this is, uh, you know, thinking about cars more fully as, as
• 58:28
  mobile computers and thinking about what they might be able to do to, um,
• 58:35
  you know, fit in, in, in that space.
• 58:38
  And what they've talked about here is an automotive operating system.
• 58:41
  So the feeling was that this was the sort of grand overarching strategy,
• 58:46
  but, but there wasn't going to be a divergence from, um, the, the simple
• 58:52
  real life safety focus that the company has always been known for.
• 58:57
  And they then talked about, she then talked about how fatality numbers
• 59:01
  have, have flatlined since about 2010.
• 59:04
  And How we're still in a place where a low or medium speed prang can prove fatal or
• 59:13
  injurious, um, not just high speed ones on the face of it's obvious, but then
• 59:19
  as you stop and think about it a little more, if we're able to protecting somebody
• 59:23
  in 113 mile an hour wreck is going to be hard, protecting somebody in a 70
• 59:27
  mile an hour wreck is going to be hard.
• 59:29
  But protecting somebody who's being injured or worse in a 30 or 40
• 59:35
  mile an hour wreck, that seems like something we could really work on.
• 59:40
  And that was, was what she was, was talking about.
• 59:43
  And, and a lot of, of this part of the presentation, it was clear that
• 59:48
  so much of what they do is, is.
• 59:49
  Blocking and tackling around things like seatbelt positioning.
• 59:55
  Um, and they talked about where she talks about how we, you know, with
• 59:58
  pedestrians, the way that we're able to design the shape of, of cars and noses
• 1:00:05
  now, and, and how, you know, there's those rules around making sure that that.
• 1:00:09
  Engine isn't right up under the hood because it used to be that, you know,
• 1:00:14
  if you fell on the hood, the hood immediately bent around the engine and
• 1:00:17
  you were basically, you know, falling right, right onto the engine block.
• 1:00:21
  So, you know, that was going to be bad for you.
• 1:00:23
  Cars recently have been designed.
• 1:00:26
  around that and she feels like there's a long, long way we can go in terms of
• 1:00:32
  simple everyday kind of, you know, not dramatic, but blocking and tackling kind
• 1:00:38
  of solutions to manage to manage that.
• 1:00:41
  So one of the things that she talked about was using.
• 1:00:45
  AI to, you know, a lot of the tests that they have at the moment are very
• 1:00:49
  rigid, you know, 45 miles an hour into a stationary object, 45 miles an hour
• 1:00:54
  into an offset object, you know, these kind of standardized kind of well, what
• 1:01:00
  if I could provide useful modeling and data because they could do Because the A.
• 1:01:07
  I.
• 1:01:07
  Can do many different speeds and many different angles of incidents and, you
• 1:01:13
  know, hardness or softness of obstacle.
• 1:01:15
  You know, you could work out a million more scenarios which are
• 1:01:20
  going to allow us a million ways to just make things incrementally safer.
• 1:01:26
  Just, you know, make sure that everyone's.
• 1:01:30
  Like me wearing a helmet with a chin visor, if we're gonna, you
• 1:01:34
  know, do the dangerous business of getting in the car at all.
• 1:01:37
  I forgot to mention, they do test dummies as well.
• 1:01:39
  They develop the standardized test dummies.
• 1:01:42
  And of course, the test dummy being a standardized size, that's another way
• 1:01:46
  in which they're standardized testings.
• 1:01:49
  They're good, but AI gives a scope to just do so much better because
• 1:01:54
  AI can test around different sizes and weights and shapes of people.
• 1:01:59
  I know what I was going to say.
• 1:02:00
  The other thing that's really interesting is at the moment, the
• 1:02:04
  airbag technology, the decision whether or not to deploy, um, is based
• 1:02:09
  on predominantly in cabin monitors.
• 1:02:13
  So things like, you know, is the steering rack moving, is the B pillar moving as
• 1:02:18
  we talked about, but they're also been doing things like using the cameras
• 1:02:24
  that have been focused on people.
• 1:02:26
  So they can see what the people are doing as well to try and take that into account
• 1:02:31
  around their, their decision making.
• 1:02:32
  Now, the other thing that they were saying it would be great if we could do was if
• 1:02:36
  we could see what was going on outside of the car as well, not just the internals
• 1:02:40
  of the car, because it was going outside of the car, because if, you know, if we
• 1:02:44
  can see that there's like, you know, we're right up the, Jack see have an 18 wheeler.
• 1:02:49
  We know that we're in the middle of an accident, so we're going
• 1:02:51
  to need to deploy the airbag.
• 1:02:53
  Whereas, you know, if we can see all around the car and see that there's no
• 1:02:56
  obstacles, we know that, you know, there's no other vehicles or, you know, we've
• 1:03:00
  not crashed into a tree or off the road.
• 1:03:02
  We know that we don't need to deploy the airbag.
• 1:03:05
  So, you know, in other words, they see The they would like to tap into
• 1:03:12
  the additional data sources which autonomous vehicles have, and when they
• 1:03:17
  tap into the additional data sources that autonomous vehicles have, they
• 1:03:21
  feel like they're going to be able to make even better decisions about when
• 1:03:26
  and where and how to deploy airbags.
• 1:03:29
  She did go as far as to say that the Autolive were almost at a crossroads
• 1:03:33
  at the moment and, and they needed to take this step away from, you know,
• 1:03:41
  the passive systems of the airbag triggering and move towards technologies
• 1:03:46
  that had these sensor inputs included.
• 1:03:50
  The.
• 1:03:51
  System that we talked about earlier that they're showing at the moment, this was
• 1:03:57
  going to be potentially driven from the bike CCU, you know, not like the D and
• 1:04:04
  easy suits that I knew where, you know, when you there's like a bungee, you're
• 1:04:08
  attached to the bike with a bungee.
• 1:04:10
  And when you separate it from the bike, it pulls the bungee
• 1:04:13
  out and that triggers the airbag.
• 1:04:14
  Which always made me think, like, you'd like get off the bike and go for a pee
• 1:04:17
  at the end of your track day session, forget and accidentally trigger the
• 1:04:20
  airbag and destroy your leather jacket.
• 1:04:23
  That was what I had envisaged happening.
• 1:04:26
  There was some discussion around whether or not there is an application around
• 1:04:31
  protecting old people from falling.
• 1:04:34
  In other words, you know, Uh, somebody who's prone to falling and
• 1:04:38
  is elderly and frail, um, you know, they might be wearing one of these,
• 1:04:42
  you know, motorcycle vest affairs.
• 1:04:45
  So when they fall, they, you know, just like a falling motorcyclist,
• 1:04:49
  they're protected by the airbag.
• 1:04:51
  It sounds absurd.
• 1:04:52
  And then you stop and think about it and you're like, actually.
• 1:04:55
  If it works, you know, if they can inflate in 10 milliseconds and it
• 1:04:59
  can protect you in a car crash, why couldn't it protect some old biddy
• 1:05:04
  who's accidentally slipped down the stairs and he's going to be immobile.
• 1:05:08
  And, you know, cause often for old people, that kind of immobility
• 1:05:11
  is life ending, isn't it?
• 1:05:13
  So, you know, it makes them feel like it's there.
• 1:05:16
  You know, it breaks their spirit.
• 1:05:17
  So if you can, you know, it's really an active way.
• 1:05:20
  And this does speak to what, you know, Hannah, the presenter was talking about
• 1:05:24
  all the way through, which is this idea that it's, it's, yes, it's, it's longer
• 1:05:29
  lives, uh, yeah, it's, it's longer life, but it's, it's more enjoyable lives.
• 1:05:33
  You know, it's, it's improving, it's keeping people alive and it's improving
• 1:05:37
  the quality of, of their lives as well.
• 1:05:39
  And it was all around a very, you know, warm.
• 1:05:42
  Uh, tree hugging kind of, of mission, which is unusual for
• 1:05:46
  automotive engineering, isn't it?
• 1:06:29
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• 1:06:42
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• 1:06:46
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• 1:06:48
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